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Blogs by Richard French
Novels? Passé? 12/17/2014 6:00:39 PM
I recently read this one-sentence paragraph on a.social media post: "Novels are so passé." Since the writer didn't support his view with argument or proof or example, he leaves a big gap for someone like me to fill.
Statements like that have been made many times, and they have some validity, especially in today's cultural environment, where we have many sources of entertainment. Still, I'm sure I'm not the only person who has read hundreds of novels over the decades. I have two going now, an audiobook of a classic by Balzac and a paperback of a modern-day work from Portugal that my brother-in-law gave me. Novels aren't passé for me and no doubt for millions of other readers. I see people reading novels on the Toronto subway nearly every day. The truth is I've even written a few and am working on another now.
I agree, though, literary novels don't appear to be at the center of our culture the way they were during the Great Depression when readers had the time to spend with "The Grapes of Wrath" and "Gone with the Wind" and works of Maugham and Du Maurierand others.
How much does that matter? Plenty of people still write novels and thousands of them are available on the Internet: mysteries, science fiction, romance, a score of other genres, and even what we now describe with the awkward term "literary novels".
There will always be readers and writers who like the freedom the novel offers, the opportunity to pass hours with an imaginative mind different from ours, and a chance to experience an interpretation of people and society that we may or may not agree with.
It's true that many traditional features of our culture are in abeyance now, but no one can say for certain what will be popular in a few decades. It may be that one or more novelists with strong talent and wide vision will come to the fore and bring public attention back to the great form again.
In the meantime, novelists, especially ones who write so-called literary stories, can be patient and continue to work faithfully. They will know that being passé according to some would-be up-to-date minds is not the same thing as being extinct.
What's more, I found a reason to be encouraged the other morning while reading about Internet publishing.The self-publishing set-up offers opportunities. Vampire novels are said to be in the ascendant now. But a reading public of many millions of people don't all want the same thing and there are numerous niches for enterprising authors. The challenge is to trust that appreciative readers exist and that diligent writers will find them.
I believe that literature will continue to take place on a continuum that began with the Greeks and the Bible and that will keep on indefinitely into the future. Even in our day, major works from days gone by -- Homer, Cervantes, George Eliot, and dozens of others along with the Old and New Testaments, -- will excite new writers and lift them up to strive to do their best+
http://www.rfrenchnovelist.com
